Former President George H. W. Bush died Friday night at his home in Houston, TX, less than eight months after the death of his wife, Barbara, whom he had been married to for 73 years.
Former President George H. W. Bush died Friday night at his home in Houston, TX, less than eight months after the death of his wife, Barbara, whom he had been married to for 73 years.
As with the death of any prominent Republican, it becomes easy to see where media outlets fall on the ideological scale. The Associated Press, for example, tweeted out its obituary with a lengthy statement disparaging the former president, who served just one term.
“George H. W. Bush, a patrician New Englander whose presidency soared with the coalition victory over Iraq in Kuwait, but then plummeted in the throes of a weak economy that led voters to turn him out of office after a single term, has died. He was 94,” the tweet said.
It’s doubtful that the second part of that tweet would be included had Bush been a Democrat.
The Washington Post initially couldn’t be bothered to put out an up-to-date obituary, and accidentally posted whatever stock obit they had prepared for Bush. As Slate tech columnist Will Oremus noted on Twitter, the Post’s original article contained the sentence, “Mr. Bush died of SPECIFIC MEDICAL CAUSE OF DEATH, said/according to xxx.”
The New York Times included a reference to its own smear of Bush from 1992 with a photo and mention of the former president being “amazed” at a supermarket scanner.
“His critics saw him as out of touch with ordinary Americans, pointing to what they portrayed as his amazed reaction during a demonstration of a supermarket scanner when he visited a grocers’ convention while president. (He later insisted that he had not been surprised.)”
Bush’s “critics” were a New York Times reporter who made up the incident, which to this day is still believed by some Americans. Ann Compton, another White House reporter who was there that day, wrote in 2014 what actually happened:
“One instance in which the media unfairly caricatured a president was at a grocers’ convention in Florida during the first President Bush’s re-election campaign.
